About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Friday, 25 January 2013

Doing Something: Obama's Second Inaugural Address

"We, The People": Unburdened by the compromising calculations of re-election, President Barack Obama, in his second inaugural address, challenged his fellow American's to fully realise the clear democratic purpose of those first three words of the United States' Constitution.

“WHY DON’T you guys do something?” Those were the words that
sparked the Gay Liberation Movement.

It was the summer of 1969 and in New York City’s Greenwich
Village there was, to quote Bob Dylan, “music in the cafés at night and
revolution in the air”. When the New York Police Department raided the
mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, a favourite haunt of the Village’s gay community, on
Saturday 28 June, trouble was not expected – and yet, trouble came.

A young lesbian woman, beaten and manhandled by the NYPD’s
finest, challenged the swelling crowd of gay street kids and transvestites to
“do something” and all their pent-up frustration and rage at the petty
humiliations routinely inflicted by the authorities spontaneously erupted into
a series of riotous protests that were not finally brought under control until
nearly 72 hours later.

It is a measure of the sea-change in American politics that,
on Tuesday morning, the re-elected President of the United States, Barack
Hussein Obama, included the Stonewall Riots among the seminal moments in the
history of the struggle for gender, racial and sexual equality in America.

To the nearly one million people gathered in the Washington
Mall to witness the second inauguration of America’s first black president, Mr
Obama declared:

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of
truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still;
just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall;
just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints
along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to
hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the
freedom of every soul on Earth.”

Many gay Americans must have wondered if their ears deceived
them. Could their President really be saying that the Stonewall riots belonged
alongside the world’s first women’s convention, held in the little upstate New
York town of Seneca Falls on 19-20 July 1848? The gathering which gave the
world a ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ signalling the birth of Feminism and the
long struggle for women’s rights? Yes he was. Nor were the billy-clubs that
battered the patrons of the Stonewall Inn to be in any way distinguished from
the billy-clubs that battered Dr Martin Luther King and the hundreds of black
civil-rights marchers he led into Selma, Alabama, on 7 March 1965. They were
all instruments of oppression: instruments to be overcome.

Could the man standing on the Capitol steps really have said
such things? Yes he could. And he said more – much more:

“It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those
pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers,
and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not
complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under
the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to
one another must be equal as well.”

"Why Don't You Guys Do Something?" The gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn confront the New York City Police. Greenwich Village, NY, NY. Saturday, 28 June 1969.

In the same week that the head of the Sensible Sentencing
Trust, Garth McVicar, asserted that Gay Marriage would lead to an increase in
New Zealand’s crime-rate, President Obama’s words are not only timely, but
inspirational.

They give notice to all those who, like Mr McVicar, regard
the great struggles for human equality and freedom not as markers of humanity’s
progress towards the unconditional love Christ commanded, but as harbingers of
Western Society’s imminent collapse, that the crippling social conservatism of
the past thirty years is at an end.

The “Rainbow Coalition” that Mr Obama has woven out of
Blacks, Hispanics, Working Women, Trade Unionists, Gays and Youth: those
Americans whom the Republican Right has worked so hard to marginalise and
exclude; now have a President who is not only ready but eager to imbue those
first three words of the United States’ Constitution – “We, the People” – with
all the democratic purpose America’s Founding Fathers intended.

Radio New Zealand–National’s Morning Report characterised President Obama’s second inaugural
address as a call for unity in a bitterly divided America. It is far from being
that. In his own way, President Obama is also asking: “Why don’t you guys do
something?”

The American Revolution, begun in “a spare Philadelphia
hall”, continues.

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 January 2013.

20 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Like many people I was disappointed with Obama’s softly-softly, don’t-frighten-the-horses approach to the job in his first term. Now the wisdom of his tactics is clear – he was ‘safe’ enough to be given a second term.Yesterday I read his inauguration speech with mounting excitement, as he revealed his true vision in inspiring words. It’s going to be an interesting four years.

While happy to be called a 'conservative' I don't know anyone, myself included, who would support the recent comments made by Garth McVicker regarding the gay marriage. That said, it seems the proponents of the bill care more about their own 'rights' than the birth right of a child to be raised by both a mother and a father.

I was interested to see you align the actions of the 'progressive' movement with a supposed march by humanity towards the 'unconditional love of Christ'. While it is a somewhat specious link, I think you may also have conflated Christ's unconditional love with unconditional approval. The are not the same thing.

As one Englishman put it, it's not a problem if you don't make it a problem. Homosexuality is now forced in our faces much more than is due a 30's novel. It's beginning to piss me off. I feel sorry for the young brothers growing up now. And I'm not looking forward to the backlash.

"Forced in our faces" how is it forced in our faces any more than heterosexuality? Or religion? This is a typical discriminator as victim statement. No one forces you to have anything to do with homosexuality.

Obama is one of the feel good heads of the U$ Two Headed One Party State. A state run for the rich by the rich. He perpetuates the American hologram of delusion.An accurate understanding of the U$ can be had from this website: "The U.S. Has An Even Larger Gap Between The Rich And The Poor Than Downton Abbey Does" http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/ There is no hope coming from that decaying NeoLiberal Edifice of a once optimistic and fairly equal former Nation.

"Mounting excitement" - I'm afraid you are doomed to disappointment, Obama has little idea of what to do and even less ability to do anything much. He constantly talks about compromise but has shown zero ability to reach out to the opposition. He is an empty vessel so that all we will hear in the next four years is words and the economy will spiral downwards.

Bam-Bam can't really do much, he's just a very powerful figurehead. Has to do what he is told.

The problems that the US has run too deep now and whatever is done the next two or more generations will feel the pinch. Two disasterous wars and a financial crunch that has hit all but the very rich has taken a dive.

I just watched the speech on You Tube last night. It was very inspirational and I thought how sad that in four years Obama will be gone - the chances of having another president with that level of rhetorical skills must be very low. It's easy to be cynical but there are moments when it's good to focus on ideals.

Hardly fair to call the entire opposition party 'barking mad'-or logical in any way. Politics is the art of compromise. Obama wants to increase taxes but not to cut spending at all, not on the most useless project the governement is running. Hardly surprising then that the Republicans don't agree. I realise that you wouldn't really gather this from our hopeless media but there is another side to every disagreement.

Just being patronizing isn't really any argument at all Anonymous. In fact it demonstrates a lack of arguments. You have no idea what I read or I you. Fact is that Obama had majorities in both houses for 2 years and did little. Now he must compromise and acknowledge that the opposition has some points or face the fact that he will have done little of any real worth in his presidency.

I'm sorry if what I write comes across as being from a deity - not my intention just the way I write I guess. For our sake, if for no other reason, I hope that Obama does succeed especially economically, its just that I see little likelyhood of that based on past experience. He just hasn't got it.